Methodologies
Design and Social Impact: A Cross-Sectoral Agenda for Design Education, Research, and Practice
This text summaries findings of the Social Impact Design Summit, held in New York on February 27, 2012. The event brought together participants from nonprofit and for-profit organizations, academic programs, government agencies, and non-governmental organizations. They represented several design disciplines: product design, graphic design, urban design, and architecture. The goal was to explore the state of an emerging design field known as “socially responsible design” or “social impact design” (8). The summit proceedings offer a snapshot of the state of the art in 2012, when this field was emerging. They outline challenges to developing impactful new forms of design, and these learnings may be transferrable to other emerging areas of design theory, like transition design. This text includes testimony and case studies from designers working in the Global South, and it identified how cultural biases can limit the emergence of new knowledge.
Smithsonian Institution Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, and National Endowment for the Arts. 2013. “Design and Social Impact: A Cross-Sectoral Agenda for Design Education, Research, and Practice.” http://tinyurl.com/3r8ppy9m.
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Knowing Through Making: The Role of the Artefact in Practise-Based Research.
In practice-based research, knowledge evolves out of creative practice. The art object is often the researcher's first response to a preliminary artistic, social, or design question. Because the process of making artefacts is central, it can be said that “invention comes before theory” in this method (Mäkelä). Whereas the scientific experiment is a series of steps that proves or disproves a hypothesis, the art object is an artefact of the creative process, and it retains significance as record of that “research.” The artefact is not secondary to the conclusions drawn from it, and the goal is not to arrive at an unambiguous interpretation of facts. Rather, practice-based research is qualitative: it proposes provisional answers to its initial question through the creation of an art object. The “correctness” of its answer lies in the scope of the interpretive possibilities that it then provides to others and the extent to which these lead to new ways of looking at the initial problem. Unlike “pure” artistic practice, practice-based research is self-interpreting. The art object raises new questions, and these are responded to by the researcher through more creative work and through writing that sheds light on the range of interpretive possibilities raised by the artifact. Practice-based research can be a useful technique for exploring the inherent value of crafted artifacts because it invites creators to simultaneously reflect on the knowledge embedded in the process of making the object as well as the social uses and cultural meaning of such objects.
Mäkelä, M. 2005. "Knowing Through Making: The Role of the Artefact in Practise-Based Research." In Binder, T. and J. Redström (eds.), Nordes 2005: In the Making, May 29-31, Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen, Denmark. https://doi.org/10.21606/nordes.2005.005
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